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Had I the slightest qualification for the task, I, Allan Quatermain,would like to write an essay on Temptation.This, of course, comes to all, in one shape or another, or at any rateto most, for there are some people so colourless, so invertebrate thatthey cannot be tempted--or perhaps the subtle powers which surroundand direct, or misdirect, us do not think them worth an effort. Thesecling to any conditions, moral or material, in which they may findthemselves, like limpets to a rock; or perhaps float along the streamof circumstance like jellyfish, making no effort to find a path forthemselves in either case, and therefore die as they have lived--quitegood because nothing has ever moved them to be otherwise--the objectsof the approbation of the world, and, let us hope, of Heaven also.The majority are not so fortunate; something is always egging theirliving personalities along this or that road of mischief. Materialistswill explain to us that this something is but the passions inheritedfrom a thousand generations of unknown progenitors who, departing,left the curse of their blood behind them. I, who am but a simple oldfellow, take another view, which, at any rate, is hallowed by manycenturies of human opinion. Yes, in this matter, as in sundry others,I put aside all the modern talk and theories and am plumb for thegood, old-fashioned, and most efficient Devil as the author of ourwoes. No one else could suit the lure so exactly to the appetite asthat old fisherman in the waters of the human soul, who knows so wellhow to bait his hooks and change his flies so that they may beattractive not only to all fish but to every mood of each of them.Well, without going further with the argument, rightly or wrongly,that is my opinion.Thus, to take a very minor matter--for if the reader thinks that thesewords are the prelude to telling a tale of murder or other great sinshe is mistaken--I believe that it was Satan himself, or, at any rate,one of his agents, who caused my late friend, Lady Ragnall, tobequeath to me the casket of the magical herb called /Taduki/, inconnection with which already we had shared certain remarkableadventures.[*][*] See the books /The Ivory Child/ and /The Ancient Allan/.Now, it may be argued that to make use of this /Taduki/ and on itswings to be transported, in fact or in imagination, to some far-awaystate in which one appears for a while to live and move and have one'sbeing is no crime, however rash the proceeding. Nor is it, since, ifwe can find new roads to knowledge, or even to interesting imaginings,why should we not take them? But to break one's word /is/ a crime, andbecause of the temptation of this stuff, which, I confess, for me hasmore allurement than anything else on earth, at any rate, in theselatter days, I have broken my word.For, after a certain experience at Ragnall Castle, did I not swear tomyself and before Heaven that no power in the world, not even that ofLady Ragnall herself, would induce me again to inhale those time-dissolving fumes and look upon that which, perhaps designedly, ishidden from the eyes of man; namely, revealments of his buried past,or mayhap of his yet unacted future? What do I say? This business isone of dreams--no more; though I think that those dreams are best leftunexplored, because they suggest too much and yet leave the soulunsatisfied. Better the ignorance in which we are doomed to wanderthan these liftings of corners of the veil; than these revelationswhich excite delirious hopes that, after all, may be but marsh lightswhich, when they vanish, will leave us in completer blackness.
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